Guernica Magazine

Readpolitik: Too God, Too Human

Akwaeke Emezi’s debut novel is a powerful exploration of the liminal. The post Readpolitik: Too God, Too Human appeared first on Guernica.

Lewis Hyde, in his seminal cultural study Trickster Makes This World, writes that “a trickster is the archetype who attacks all archetypes. He is the character in myth who threatens to take the myth apart. He is an ‘eternal state of mind’ that is suspicious of all eternals, dragging them from their heavenly preserves to see how they fare down in this time-haunted world.”

Akwaeke Emezi, the author of the debut novel Freshwater, is a literary trickster, an Afropolitan who glides between US and Nigerian cultures, mores, and faiths. Her bio says that she is an “Igbo and Tamil writer artist based

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